


Crack'd

by Mizzy



Category: Mirrors (2008)
Genre: Community: help_japan, Creepy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:26:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizzy/pseuds/Mizzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben Carson thought he had survived the Mayflower smashing down on his head.  He was wrong.</p><p>He thought the demon Esseker had been killed in the incident.</p><p>He was wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crack'd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zoi no miko (zoi_no_miko)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoi_no_miko/gifts).



> This would not exist had Zoi no Miko not purchased it in the Help_Japan auctions, so please direct all blame towards her. Thank you.

**Crack’d**

Ben Carson once chased a criminal all the way to an abandoned warehouse in Utah.

If that incident in his past had been as simple as it sounded, there would be no story. As it was, Ben had been deeply undercover, and crossing so many state lines all at once meant he was left in legal limbo, stuck in the constraints of his cover, unable to proactively move on his target until some hick judge pushed permission through.

Ben took up working as a night watchman at the warehouse and was stuck there for five long months in total, desperately missing Amy and Daisy (Michael was still affectionately known as ‘Bump’ in that period of their life) and he rampantly cursed every day at the backwards town he was trapped in.

If he had known at the time that _backwards_ was a horrible exaggeration, Ben would have bitten those curses back.

It takes Ben a long time to adjust living in the mirror world, which is a place that truly embraced the real definition of _backwards_. It felt so unreal for so long. He could touch things, affect things on his side, move objects, write on surfaces, pick up items... and everything on the other side didn’t move at all.

Like his calendar. He had a calendar in the apartment he found on a building on 4th and 5th street, a place he knew was abandoned in the real world (more of that legal tape trapping things in limbo) where the whole bedroom was covered in mirror (the original owner was a perverted drugs baron) and when he marked the days off on the calendar, and held it up to the mirror, the calendar mirror image remained on the wall behind him, dusty and unmarked.

Food, that was the oddest thing.

Ben had been so very nervous trying food for the first time in the mirror world, convinced it was going to kill him, or worse that digestion worked backwards in the place too. But he had been so very hungry, and the piss he took against the wall, and the vomit that bellowed out of his stomach that first day, and the hunger... it all combined to a moment where he felt ridiculously brave as he downed a handful of peanuts. Then he felt a rush of overwhelming sadness, because it was the first time since taking on the demon that he’d felt at all brave since shooting—anyway, he was brave, and a great role model for Michael, and he’d never be in his son’s life properly ever, ever again—

The sadness swallowed up all his nervousness at eating, and he had chewed and swallowed the peanuts without properly thinking about it.

The next handful, as the first didn’t kill him, deserved a lot more thought, because the peanuts didn’t taste like he remembered. Instead of salty, and earthy, they sort of tasted sweet, and light, like circus peanuts, not real peanuts.

Food in the mirror world was like that. Backwards. Ben spent an hour in a supermarket, filling a basket with food (and yet, however much he took, the mirror told him the shelf remained full, and the next day when he went back the mirrorworld shelf was full too) and testing it all and it was completely backwards – sweet things tasted savoury, his favourite foods tasted like broccoli and sprouts (ugh), and broccoli and sprouts tasted like burgers and beer and cake. Daisy and Michael would have loved it—

Ben’s throat tightened and he spent a week instead trying to find out how the shelves filled themselves up. He had a theory some shelf stacker maybe was in the mirror world, but the shelves only filled up when he fell asleep.

The mirrorworld appeared to have more people in it than the backwards Utah town Ben had visited (and Ben regrets that job more than ever, because if he hadn’t been so semi-content as a night watchman there, he never would have considered the Mayflower, and now maybe he’d be a drunk hobo in a ditch, but at least he would be on the right side of the mirror) but none of them could see him, and barely any of them even blinked when he tried to leave messages on the mirror with his handprints (a kid saw one of his handprints, which is why he knew it was somewhat possible to get a message through, but there was only so much an imprint of fingers and palms could do.) He spent what was probably a month scouring New York city, a hand mirror outstretched at all times, but while he saw several murders happening firsthand, he never found another person at all.

The _drunken hobo in a ditch_ alternate lifestyle inevitably caught his attention, so he broke a door in a convenience store and jumped over a counter and downed half a bottle of Jim Beam in one go. Except all it made him do was want to pee. He used the staff bathroom (some habits were hard to break) and realized, half an hour later, that he was still disturbingly sober. Then again, it was the mirrorworld. He found a Jewish convenience store that stocked some alcohol-free lager (regal eerf lohocla in the mirrorworld), and happily downed the lot and got very drunk indeed. He emptied their fridge, walked around the neighbourhood, found more alcohol free beer, stumbled into an empty room at a 5* hotel, and got roaringly drunk. He continued it for, well, he lost track of days. He tried to watch the news to find out the date, but the TV was too big and the hand mirror too small, and he was still somewhat drunk, obviously.

When he eventually sobered up, because he drank too much and passed out and found two other people in his bed, oblivious to him, tearing each other’s clothes off, he ran for it.

It took him a while to remember his name.

Beeennn.

Bennn.

Nosrac Neb.

No, Ben Carson.

His head was pounding. He took a Tylenol to make it all better, but it was mirrorworld, and the mild painkiller worked like morphine. At least when he woke up this time, he was surer of his name. Ben, Ben, Ben. _Say it three times in a mirror_. Ben remembered when he was a kid, sneaking into a bathroom while his mates slept over, except they were huddled outside the door, whispering him on, making him hold up a candle and chant Bloody Mary three times. He had been too scared to. They ribbed him endlessly, and Ben had always felt ashamed, always felt guilty he hadn’t been brave enough (what kind of example could he ever set to his son?) but now he felt relieved, because what if Bloody Mary, or Candyman, had been a demon in this mirrorworld like Anne Esseker had been? Because in the mirrorworld it was so hard to remember your name, so someone saying your name, over and over, would be like a siren call, pulling you on. Pulling you _through_.

Except it would never happen for him. His family were too scared to be near mirrors ever again, and no one else knew his name well enough to say it even once, let alone three times.

He was just thinking maybe, maybe he would let himself forget his name, and sink into a puddle of inebriation and Tylenol highs, when he saw _her_.

Just out the corner of one eye. Ben thought it was a hallucination first, or maybe a car speeding down one of the streets the wrong way, but he heard a faint thumping above his head, like the slap of bare hands and feet on tin, but real fast, like one of those small electronic hand fans that ran off batteries and Amy used to swear in raptures about in the summer heat, and he _knew_.

The only thing keeping Ben content through the weird weeks in the Mirrorworld had been, at least, his death had not been in vain. Bringing the building down might have killed him, but at least he had broken Anne Esseker’s body, killing the demon at the same time.

The idea came in low and cold, like a draft curling in under a door and spiralling down his spine - what if he was wrong, and the demon was still alive, as trapped in the real world as he was in the mirrorworld?

Step one. Finding his family.

Ben warred with his own thoughts for a long backwards minute, because maybe there was a more selfless way to find the demon, but he first and foremost, before the screw-ups and the night watchman stints, he was a detective. Chasing down serial killers had been his thing, and Esseker – was there anything else he could call the demon? - might be in a new league of serial killers, but at the heart of it all, that’s what she- it- was. It might have supernatural powers, but is motivations were not so esoteric.

He went to the Cartridge World on 35th Street just to figure it out first, because he doubted himself constantly in the mirrorworld, but when he propped up a whiteboard, ripped off the plastic covering and scrawled over it with a permanent marker (the security mirror claimed this wasn’t happening, but that was nothing new) he started to feel more and more like himself. The sureness wasn’t nearly enough to fight off the dread in him that grew in him the moment on hearing Esseker’s slapping footsteps, but at least it was strong enough to have a chance of contention.

The lines and the facts all boiled down to the fact that Esseker was a completionist if nothing else. It made sense. Esseker was a demon, who fed off fear, and the unknown was the scariest thing in the world. If everyone knew about Esseker, the fear would be less, so Esseker’s MO had logically been to find victims that she- it? – could take out in isolation. The destroyed department store had been perfect. Lure victims in, slowly drive them mad, take them out in pieces. Humans automatically filled in the gaps for it. Oh, the burned building, it’s just unlucky. It’s a death trap. They might even go so far to think _oh, it’s haunted_ , but in the everyday world of daylight haunted just meant unexplained science and coincidence. No one actually believed in hauntings.

No one _alive_.

Apart from people like his family, who had seen it. Who had barely survived with their lives. And in a society where these things happened, but you couldn’t prove it, you hid. You protected yourself as much as you could, and you hid, and you lied. _Oh, we moved because it was good for the kids. Oh, we don’t have mirrors because we’re so close we let each other know if there’s something wrong with how you look. Oh, we do have mirrors, they’re at the cleaners..._

Ben couldn’t research easily how to find any other such survivors. He didn’t even know if there were any. He searched for three days without sleep through police files, holding them up to his hand mirror, squinting when the lights went out but forcing himself to keep going, because the sound of Esseker’s footsteps were in his head now, circling round and round like a syncopated drum beat.

There were no leads but his own family.

He didn’t know that where they were. He hadn’t even gone to check where they were, but he knew Amy, and he knew how practical she was. In a situation like they had been through, she would have gone.

He gets on a train, hanging around a couple of businessmen so the doors don’t close on him (Ben hasn’t tested this out, but he doesn’t want to risk it. For all he knows he’s basically a ghost, and if cut in half by doors, maybe he’ll just disappear completely.) He follows them into a carriage that is mostly empty, and he sits in an empty seat in the middle, watching the buildings speed past, trying his best not to be perturbed that his own reflection isn’t part of the blurred show.

He feels an almost thrum of energy in his abdomen, and he recognises it as the bubbling feeling he always got when he was on his way to see Daisy and Michael, like someone carbonated the contents of his stomach. Just the idea of seeing them again – even though it was a stupid idea, because Amy would have moved them, she had to – was making him giddy. He tapped his fingers on the armrest in anticipation, and turned to the window again, and something _blurred_ in the corner of his eye for a second. For a giddy moment he thought it was his reflection, and getting closer to his home – his family – was what could make him real again, but then he realized the sound of his fingers tapping the arm rest was still sounding above the rush of the train, but his hands were still.

 _Esseker_.

Ben couldn’t get it out of his mind that it was a she. Things were just too damned weird to have to affix strange pronouns to things. He didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. Especially as the demon still looked female. At least, the flash of long hair, a moment of a curved hip, and that was all he needed - he was too panicked to spend any more time thinking about semantics.

He threw himself out of the seat, tense and trying not to freak out, because a calm mind was what was needed to catch an enemy. Panic distracted, made your heart pound and your vision blur and your hearing vague, and none of those things was going to help him catch something that shouldn’t even exist.

 _There_. A flash of her hair again, behind him, through the sliding door in the next carriage, moving up the window to the roof. He saw a glimpse of her movements making a reflection on the window but he didn’t have time to think about how to defeat her – knowing more about her, how she operated, that was the only way he was ever going to stop her.

Ben ran without thinking about it, and the sensation of passing through the _closed_ glass doors was disturbing, like water going into your eyes, or being high on morphine, but it was something he pushed into the back of his head to think about later. His brain was trained on one thing. Esseker.

 _There, again_. In the next carriage over. Ben pushed himself forwards, heaving air into his lungs, regretting not keeping up with his usual daily fitness regime. Even in the months he was drunk off his ass, he would start his day with sit ups and press ups and a jog. He was badly out of shape. _Having a building fall on you sort of does that to you_. The thought’s funny, and Ben shakes it away. He doesn’t have time.

He pushes at the first person to get in his way, a pensioner struggling with her heavy luggage, and he feels bad the very moment his hands should have connected with her body, but instead he pushes right through her, his palms sticking out through her face. Weirded out, Ben closes his eyes for a second and runs forward, pushing through her, and it’s that same, sickening, eyes underwater feeling, and he risks a look back, and the woman pauses and puts a hand to her chest, like she has _realized_ something has gone wrong.

Ben can’t waste time on processing that either. Especially when he sees her at the end of the carriage, pawing at the glass doors, apparently unable to push through them like he can. He hurtles forwards without having a real plan, and when he reaches her, he reacts instinctively – he yanks someone’s guitar off the top luggage rack, and hurls it at her head.

It bounces off the roof, and smacks through her, and then onto the floor, and Esseker doesn’t react one jot. Ben hisses under his voice, and casts around, looking for inspiration, and he reaches out towards a compact fire extinguisher, and he must have reached too far in one direction, because Esseker turns and looks directly out of one of the windows.

Ben turns, wondering what she’s seeing, and realizes, as his eyes locked with her maddened, bloodshot ones, that she’s somehow seeing _him_. All those years in the mirror must have made her more attuned to mirrorworld things, or something. As his eyes lock with hers through the reflection on the glass, Ben realizes he doesn’t know a lot of things, but he knows one thing for sure – they’re in a small carriage, and people are going to notice the demon on the ceiling, if they haven’t already.

Which means, if Esseker fits her usual MO, she’s going to try and take them all out.

Ben tries hard not to think about all the trains in recent history that have crashed, and all the disasters which have been borderline accident or caused incident. He did a lot of paperwork on a lot of such incidents. How many more demons might be out there, destroying masses of things in order to get away with masses of murders?

His stomach tightens. He can’t change anything, but maybe he can stop _this_ one.

“Esseker!” He yells it, loud, managing to project his gruff voice loudly even against the background noise of the huffing train. “Esseker, I’m here, dammit. Come and finish me off. Or do you like leaving jobs unfinished?”

Esseker turns her head, scanning the windows of the train, obviously trying to get a good glimpse of where he was. Ben jumps up and down, and waves his arms.

“I’m right here you piece of crap.”

Esseker freezes for a second, and then a too-wide grin stretches on her face, stretching the whole masquerade of a face apart. Then she launches herself at him, super fast.

Ben turns, and relies on the sound of her slapping feet to guide him. He has a vague plan in his head, and he just has to hope his knowledge of this train ride is good enough. They’re ten minutes away from reaching the train’s final destination, so if his calculations are right, this should work.

He runs through the train carriages, pushing through the doors now as if they’re made of thin air, and even though Esseker is a hundred times faster than him, the doors are slowing her down. He remains as much in sight for her as he can, and makes it obvious he’s going to the very end.

Ben breaks out through onto the very end of the train, and panics for a moment he’s timed it all wrong, but he hears the far of honk of the train coming in the other direction, and he can’t help the grin. It’s probably stretching his own face wider than the primal grin on Esseker’s face but he doesn’t care, he feels triumphant and giddy.

Fortune definitely smiles at him, and Esseker body slams through the back door of the train in perfect timing, her clawlike hands curling around his body, her pointed fingernails ripping into his skin. He just laughs into her face, and hurls them both from the train.

Right into the path of the incoming train from the other direction.

Esseker doesn’t even have time to scream.

The sensation of the train rushing through him is disorienting to say the least, but Ben is fine once it has whistled its way through him, and he dusts his clothes down with his hands even though he’s technically okay. He just feels like there _should_ be demon parts all over him. Just like there is all over the rail tracks.

He laughs. He can’t help it. It’s a long hearty laugh. He walks along the rail tracks, counting up the pieces of Esseker, strewn all over the place. She’s gone, she’s really gone. Pulverised. By a train. It’s glorious, and he didn’t need a plan, he just needed his cop intuition, something he thought would have been entirely gone. Michael and Daisy and Amy would be so proud of him.

 _Michael and Daisy and Amy._

Without Esseker to worry about, he could really focus on finding his family without worrying about leading Esseker to them. The idea of it made Ben almost as giddy as flying through the air, Esseker in his grasp at last. He walked back to the nearest station and got on the next train. No point going the slow way when all kinds of transport was free to him forever more.

As he thought, his old house was empty, so he jumped into someone’s taxi who was travelling up to the borough his mother-in-law lived. He walked through the door (literally) into the house and found a half-finished letter to Amy, and the envelope was addressed. Amy hadn’t gone too far. Ben found a Greyhound that was going that way and sat up near the driver, grinning the whole time. This wasn’t real life, but he was going to somehow see his family, and in a makeshift way see his kids grow up.

As he thought, the house Amy had bought had no mirrors. Even the water was restricted. Still, Amy was conscientious and his children were careful, so there was no way Amy wouldn’t have sent them to a High School, and the local one was where he found them, all three of them.

Amy was leaning against a car, a black four by four, and it had dirty windows and dirty panels. It was a good way to minimise reflections. Amy would hate having to drive a dirty car. The thought makes his smile more rueful as he revels in the sacrifices Amy has made to keep their children safe. However, the car next to her was shiny and clean, and if Amy or the children would step closer he could see them properly, and maybe he could leave them messages with his fingers. Maybe one day he could talk to them, through the mirror. Esseker had done it. Maybe with enough time it was something he could learn.

“Hey.” Michael, of course, was the first to approach the other car. His curiosity was always overwhelming. Ben loved his curiosity and his strength and his insatiable desire for knowledge. Michael was pointing, pointing at where Ben’s reflection _should_ be. Ben’s heart lurched unsteadily. Could it be possible Michael could _see_ him? “Mom, look-“

“Baby, no.” Amy’s voice was harsh, cold as steel. “Get away from that window, now.”

“But mom, it’s dad-“

“Daddy?” Daisy squealed, running to join her brother, Amy failing to hold her back.

Ben’s heart lurched again, and he looked, scarcely wanting to believe it himself, and there he was. _There he was_. In the mirror. His reflection. Smiling. Almost in tears. His reflection, right alongside his family’s.

“Amy. Amy.” Ben’s reflection’s mouth moved as his words did, and Amy stepped up closer to the window, her mouth dropping open slowly, her eyes filling with tears.

“Baby?”

“Amy, I’m here. I’m here. I love you.” Ben stepped closer to them, wanting to see them, wanting to see his own reflection next to that of his family’s, because although it wasn’t as good as real life, it was better than nothing, it was-

But his reflection didn’t move, even though Ben had. The thrill of seeing his family was swept away in the embrace of total fear. Ben’s reflection smiled at him, and pulled out a gun from his jacket, the same one that had shot the other guy, something which seemed so long ago. His reflection’s smile turned wider, and wider, and melted away into the grinning face of Esseker.

Ben screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

No one ever reported hearing anything but three single gun shots.


End file.
